Back in the “good old days”, i.e. say the 1950’s, life was much simpler. Female labor participation was low, their salaries were low, the Pill had yet to be invented, marriage was a respected institution, divorce and single motherhood were very much frowned upon, and female obesity was very low. There was one guy for every eligible girl and dating was a a sweet and simple affair.

Fast forward to today. Female salaries and labor participation have practically equalized with those of men, thus diluting men’s relative economic power. The Pill and the end of belief in the sanctity of marriage (divorce and single motherhood have soared since the 1960’s) have unleashed the floodgates of female hypergamy; across femdom, chicks are looking to mate up, leaving their now powerless beta providers by the wayside. On the other end of the scale, female obesity – fueled by aesthetic WMD’s in the form of McDonald’s, KFC, and corn subsidies – has ballooned, to the extent that it now afflicts almost half the female population. Nothing destroys a woman’s looks and attractiveness to men quite like obesity. This alone halves the eligible pool of fuckable women.

But then on the other end of the scale (no pun intended) you have the appearance of soft polygamy. This is a natural consequence of the disappearance of those social mores and taboos that in prior decades held female hypergamy in check. With that loosened, alpha males – both natural alphas (e.g. Tom Cruise, Silvio Berlusconi), and betas who learn game (e.g. Neil Strauss, Roosh) – develop harems, ushering in soft polygamy. Women are biologically wired such that they would rather share an alpha with many other women and compete for his attentions rather than tolerate monogamy with a beta. Case in point.

Alphas now have it better than they ever; the world is their oyster as never before with the sole exceptions, perhaps, in the twilight periods of decadent civilizations, or the aftermaths of great wars that rewarded men’s spilled blood with beautiful postwar ratios. Pinned down between the Scylla of female obesity and the Charybdis of soft polygamy, betas face a hellscape of shuffling shoggoths, indentured orbitude to the few remaining classy women, and nightly love-making to the lonely hand.

This no doubt goes someway to explaining the increasing physical manifestations of involuntary male celibacy: Aggressive, in-your-face homosexuality; asexuality; men marrying their cats; men marrying their sex dolls; genital cutting all the way down to penile bisection (if you Google this, I’m not liable for your psychotherapy costs); men cutting off and cooking their own penises; etc. The latter phenomena are indeed the most potent (inverse pun) symbols of male emasculation at the dawn of the new millennium.

Unlike many in the “manosphere”, I don’t bother attaching moral labels to these developments. It’s a waste of time. Besides morality is beta anyway. There are two immediately relevant things to take away from this “game” interpretation of recent American social history:

(1) The importance of learning game for any aspiring lifestyle artist if he is not already a natural; or at the very least, migrating someplace where feminism and female obesity has yet to make major inroads, like Russia, Poland, or Argentina.

(2) For all the possible holes in “game theory” (and I think I can identify a few), it’s still far superior an explanation of the trajectory of American society than anything, absolutely ANYTHING, you will find in your sociology textbooks. The only contender, and it’s more complement than competition, is Murray’s and Herrnstein’s work on cognitive stratification and the IQ bell curve – for which they’ve been made academic pariahs. That is because modern academe embraces cultural Marxism and loathes reality.

Comments

Morality aside, I am more interested in the long-term consequences of the recent shift in sexual behavior. In my opinion all civilizations were built by channeling the free time and creative power of men (until the advancement of sanitation, vaccination and antibiotics women simply did not have much free time) to the advancement of family (and as a consequence the whole society). Or in ecological terms the K-strategy was made preferable over R-strategy for most men (for women K-strategy was the only option). This implied two things – sexual competition had to be minimized and and men had to be assured that the offspring their wives had were indeed their. Thus in all civilizations there were strict rules regulating marriage and female adultery was punished hard.
This ages-old structure is now changing and society is moving to uncharted territory because for the first time in history, thanks to antibiotics and vaccination, women actually have free time and can participate in society outside of immediate family.

“Alphas now have it better than they ever; the world is their oyster as never before with the sole exceptions, perhaps, in the twilight periods of decadent civilizations, or the aftermaths of great wars that rewarded men’s spilled blood with beautiful postwar ratios”

Have you missed the fact that many primitive cultures, such as ones found in Africa when European powers explored the continent, had a structure very similar to your description? I can find you the exact reference if you’re interested, but I remember Azar Gat quoting anthropological studies of a tribe in Austral Africa where the old chiefs enjoyed very large polygamy, with the consequence that some 40% of men, mostly the young, couldn’t have a bride. As a result, they were living in bands away from the tribe and were very violent and destructive.
He had many other examples in geography and history and implied (convincingly) that this structure was a rather universal feature of early human societies, one which was abandoned long ago in other more advanced civilizations.

Thus when Lauris talks about the “stict rules” in all civilizations, he’s probably just evoking the successful ones that we’re all familiar with and left a significant mark on the world and in human culture. That is by overshadowing (and crushing) the uncompetitive others. That we revert to these structures, indeed that could be called decadence. I don’t know exactly when you’re considered or not an “alpha” but certainly I don’t consider having a society of 1) mostly sex-starved individuals and 2) dysfunctional families to be especially future-proof or harmonious. People trying Game may temporarily solve 1) by fooling one-night stands but in doing so never solve and even aggravate 2). It’s a matter of perspective.

Yes, I did miss that fact. Modern US society is reverting to tribalistic ways of life; at least, in the lower IQ segments.

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It’s important to divorce the macro from the personal. At the personal level game is simply a necessity to have a fulfilling sexual life in America. Ironically this reinforces the very dystopian trends that make game necessary in the first place. I guess it’s a vicious cycle, but what’s the alternative? Alimony bondage? Marrying your cat?

There’s precious little and often nothing than an individual can do to alter social/historical forces. This blog’s perspective is to observe and analyze these forces rationally while holding that anything goes as far as individual fulfillment is concerned.

I wonder about this myself. As experience —and Charles Murray’s new book—show, marriage or at least long term, monogamous together-living (‘cohabitation’ is a dumb word) is alive and well among say the top 45%. Where the scale is some average of IQ, income, education and subjective social class. Betas are still getting married, only now they marry uglier and less happy women than before, have fewer children and take longer to have them. My best guess is that, in 30 years those who have the brains/institutions to resist part or much of the hyper stimulation and madness of the world (SWPLs, Ivy elites, Mormons, nutty Christians and some ethnic groups like Hindu Indians) hold things together and make nearly all of the surplus. Something like a minimum guaranteed income system might be set up to keep the low IQ hordes at bay in different parts of town, and innovative entertainment will keep mass shootings by beta males to a minimum. Basically, economic growth can keep the current trainwreak going for a long time. The key is getting the owners of capital to support a minimum guaranteed income system, as more and more of national income goes to capital, not labor.

If the sexual emancipation continues the way it is progressing now, the minimum guaranteed income will not be sufficient. Betas need sexual partners – and if the future society does not give them a reasonable way to fulfill this need no amount of material wealth will help – they will revolt. Our reproductive instinct is just too deeply coded.
This is also the weakest point of all proposed Utopian societies. Things like project Venus may sound nice until you realize that in such society two thirds of men will be deprived of female partners (because of The Game). And regardless of material benefits their instinct forces them to turn against any such society. Sexual attention is the highest priced commodity for humans – and there cannot be true social harmony unless it is somehow distributed fairly. But due to our ages-old instincts the fair distribution is possible only in repressive systems.

Getting the elites to support more welfare is going to be difficult. It won’t happen I suspect and will if anything reverse. First, the prospects for growth aren’t all that bright (fiscal problems, peak oil); second, the growing share of NAM’s in the population who will remain the biggest recipients of welfare – and growing unwillingness of the nation-forming population group (i.e. whites) to fund them, especially due to their own growing economic problems. I can imagine a caste-like society coming into being over the next century complete with a sprinkling of alpha libertines and rich Zuckerberg-like betas at the top building legal and physical ramparts against the growing hordes of shudras shuffling about outside the gated compounds…

Sexual attention is the highest priced commodity for humans – and there cannot be true social harmony unless it is somehow distributed fairly. But due to our ages-old instincts the fair distribution is possible only in repressive systems.

Very eloquent encapsulation of the central dilemma.

I would also note (cf. Murray via Hank) that as it is higher IQ people who are most successful at resisting reprimitivization (discounting Mormons, etc., among whom traditionalism still dominates) then said utopian schemes only have a good chance of realization in said high IQ societies. Hence why caste divisions appear to be the logical culmination of modern American civilization.

Welfare is the cheapest solution to the problem so welfare state simply out-compete non-welfare states.

“nation-forming population group (i.e. whites)”

I know this is how i would define it in the US but in the UK Blacks are part of the nation-forming group. One could argue the out shell but definitely inside it. Paki’s, even the Indian Hindu kind, aren’t

Low class mobile societies are less competitive than high mobile societies. They are also less likely to attract emigrants. Both lead to being less successful.

What is your definition of reprimitivization cause i want to know if Scandinavia fits with it

ps. Again weird choice of typical alpha/beta. I would see Zuckerberg as a typical top alpha

Re-primitivization. –> (Re)adoption of social mores from primitive societies. The age of religiously sanctioned and socially enforced monogamy for instance appears to be an exceedingly short one in big historical terms.

Zuckerberg is a financial “alpha” (though I prefer not to mix terms as that leads to confusion) but he is most definitely a sexual beta.

There is a big difference between official mores and how they are executed in practise. I seriously doubt that Victorian London in 1872 was more monogamous than London in 2012. Having multiple wives is more an indication of big income differences than of morality.

Morality IMHO does not come from religion but from society which forms religion to uphold the morality of its society.

I admit I haven’t read any of these “Game” type books, so I have to rely on you guys to keep me informed. So… “Game theory” is basically about lonely men trying to find a girlfriend?
Well, if you can’t find a nice girl on this planet, there seems to be a surplus of SPACE AMAZONS!

Hi, Jennifer. I WISH I could find the rest of this wonderful movie. I would watch it every day and build an altar to it. Alas, all I could find is this one clip.
Yes, Valkyr seems like a very nice transvestite, the kind you could take home to meet your mom. I like “her” a lot. I would even date “her” if “she” promised not to strangle me too much.
But my favorite girl is Bochino. “Bochino, prepare for inspection!”
Bochino: “We will support ourselves by hunting and pillaging.”
Meanwhile, everybody is INSPECTING HER GORGEOUS BUTTOCKS…
I think, in the next scene (the one I can’t find), our intrepid girl heroes hunt down the surplus male population of Planet Earth. They use the Betas only for target practice. They will mate with an Alpha, but only once, and just to procreate, after which they chop his head off. It’s like a neo-feminist nightmare for Gamers!

I would point out that marriage is now one of the main markers of being high class and respectable. It is also a part of a much better life. Marriage is probably one of the biggest things in 2012 that distinguishes the respectible from the prole. These days, most proles and low IQ types are out-of-marriage while most non-proles and high IQ types are in marriage or on the path to marriage. By the way, this is not new. In Europe for many centuries, it was the respectable people that got married and the underclasses who settled for common law or less. After some twentieth century turbulence, are we returning to the old stratification? Here’s some are reasons why marriage is superior:

1. Why would you invest heavily in another person without a commitment? Why would another person invest heavily in you? This matters to people whose time and energy actually have value.

2. Kids do better on average in marriages. And if realize you are mortal and you want a legacy and the pride of children, marriage is the way to go.

3. Working on a short-term contract is tiresome and hardly a long-term solution. In the long term, you want to be able to relax and screw up from time to time and not have to worry about starting over all the time.

4. The most desireable women get pulled off the market and the pool gets worse and worse. Pretty and desireable women get marriage proposals and the ones who don’t accept tend to be the ones with a coarser nature. Also, over time, the market of single women tends to be increasingly populated by prole women, angry feminists and divorcees.

5. Why should you think about game morning noon and night? Life is also about achieving things other than notches on a bedpost.

6. Being a gamer, the odds of your manhood acquiring a disease asymptotically approach 1.

Marriage is decreasing as more and more people are becoming prole / low class. So? If proles become a majority, that doesn’t make me want to become prole.

The poor settled for common law because marriage (wedding) was expensive. And there is the whole access to the law thing.

1 Cohabitation is a commitment

2 Very difficult to compare the two groups. Especially considering there is selection process for the parents to be to not choose marriage is they don’t think they are going to make it

3. You are not on a short-term contract if you have kids or a house together.

4. This is absolutely incorrect. The women who get pulled from the market below 20 are on average not the most desirable. And i think you mean cohabitation proposals as weddings without cohabitation is not the proper way to do things. Older women (and men) have more confidence and it is completely logical that they are also more likely to have been in a relationship. There is also the issue if you want to be in a real relationship with an 18 year old girl when you are 40

you said: Cohabitation is a commitment
Dude, what? You can pack your bags and move out in the instant of your choosing. I lived in nine different places during college. Are you quadriplegic or something?

you said: You are not on a short-term contract if you have kids or a house together

If you are married than you can pick up your bags to. Nothing is really stopping you. Also college. If you marry at that time of your life you are weird, and likely to divorce.

How much is that a selection process? Say you get pregnant from a one-night stand. In the UK you are not going to get married but cohabitation is definitely a likely option. Do you think those circumstances have a high change of failing? There is also a big class and age effect. Young people are simply more likely to be unmarried when they have children

The normal way of doing things in Anglo/Germanic West is first a few years of cohabitation than marriages. So it is not surprising that cohabitations end more often. I also wonder how they got their numbers (doubt that that is easy) or their definition of cohabitation (living together doesn’t necessarily mean sleeping together.)

The point isn’t moot. You are pulled from the market when you have a serious boyfriend. Not when you are married. You could say when they are married but women who are married before their 27 are on average not the most desirable (at least in the UK)

I’ve known natural alphas. I don’t think I’ve known anyone who was able to fake it successfully. That Roosh guy is selling self-help books, isn’t he? It’s hard to fool people about one’s personality. Even Hollywood actors mostly play themselves. And if women are good at anything at all besides childbirth and child rearing, it’s picking up non-verbal clues about a person’s emotional core and current emotional state. Women are bad at math, physics, blogging, painting, sailing and millions of other such things to a large extent because they’re naturally bored by them. The question of whether or not you’re lying to them, putting up a front – that’s not boring to them at all.

“Unlike many in the “manosphere”, I don’t bother attaching moral labels to these developments. It’s a waste of time. Besides morality is beta anyway.”

OK, as a nerd I’m biased. But you’ve got to admit that there is a dysgenic trend going on. I’ve seen Richard Lynn describe the Flynn Effect in an interview as progressively worse seeds getting more and more fertilizer. A concern about global seed quality is moral to me. A moral person wishes humanity well. You’ve mentioned technological singularity recently. Do you want us to ever get there or not? If we keep getting dumber, wilder and less responsible with each generation, if that trend continues indefinitely, we will never get there.

For example, the traits that women’s parents usually look for in potential sons-in-law are more civilizationally beneficial than the traits that young women themselves look for in partners. So parental veto on mate choice, which is seen in all classical literature – Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Flaubert, etc. – is civilizationally progressive, and therefore moral. Letting young people decide for themselves is regressive in the sense that moving back to the jungle, nakedness, competition for resources with wild animals would be a step back for our species. Where is humanity headed? To me that’s a moral question.

People have been complaining since the Greeks about the wrong people having all the kids. This explains why schools have become so bad because people have also been complaining about the kids being much more civilized when they were young

Yes, and the classical Greek civilization did disappear. Their production of new technology, math, natural philosophy, realistic art stopped, and then 99.9% of everything that had been produced was destroyed or rotted away. What we have now are tiny, unrepresentative scraps.

Many centuries later Western Europeans got interested in the ruins and the copies of the copies of the badly-made copies of the tiny scraps left over from ancient literature, history, math and proto-science. There’s no guarantee that anyone would be interested in the legacy of our world if it goes down through decadence.

“Parental veto on mate choice … is civilisationally progressive and therefore moral.” I have to disagree with that. If you look at some of AK’s previous posts on HBD, you’ll see we’ve had conversations about the frequency of cousin marriage and uncle/niece marriage in Muslim countries and what effect the resulting inbreeding might have on the offspring’s intelligence potential. Such marriages are usually arranged by parents or other relatives, not by young people, and if these marriages cement traditions, customs or other cultural and social institutions that damage human intelligence potential and maintain a cycle of poverty, low intelligence, low creativity and cultural backwardness, you’d have to agree that in those contexts letting young people make their own mating choices would be the better option.

I think that while the traditional family structure existed in the West, the West was becoming more civilized with time. The 19th century was without a doubt more civilized than the 9th, for example. As the traditional family structure began decaying in the early 20th century, the level of civilization started decreasing. The decline of the family wasn’t the only cause of the civilizational decline, but it must have been a cause. The decline can be seen in everything except for science and technology: manners, the complexity and subtlety of the arts, the willingness to involve civilians in wars, clothing styles and millions of other things. Is the level of civilization declining now in Muslim countries? I doubt it. Is it increasing? It could be slowly increasing, it could be staying at the same level. You’re looking at current levels, I’m looking at the direction of change.

As for cousin marriage, when not overdone it’s not incompatible with success. Obviously, royalty was inbred in most countries in most periods. Some of these families held on to power for more than 1,000 years. Normally holding on to power isn’t easy for a single year anywhere. The class as a whole held on to power from the dark ages till very recently, even though it was heavily inbred. I read Niall Ferguson’s book about the Rothschilds a few years ago. They were heavily inbred. As I remember, most of their marriages in the 19th century were cousin or uncle-niece marriages. The Rothschildes aren’t as prominent now as they were in their 1815-1915 heyday, but neither are they poor.

One of my father’s uncles was married to his own first cousin. I remember being told by my parents that this used to be normal among Jews. It’s not anymore, which I would guess is the result of the influence of Russian and Western attitudes to this, a product of partial assimilation.

I don’t doubt that ceteris paribus inbreeding decreases intelligence and general health by some amount, and I don’t doubt that it can be deadly when overdone, but I also know of historical examples of pretty successful groups of people practicing it for centuries. Ceteris is never paribus. If the king of Morocco banned cousin marriage tomorrow, would Morocco become wealthy in 100 years? I doubt it.

Oh, and aren’t race horses heavily inbred? They must be pretty healthy to be able to win all those races. If the equine equivalent of mutts could win at the racetrack, then that’s probably whom everyone in that business would use instead of the thoroughbreds.

I don’t know about racehorses in other countries but about 1990, nearly all racehorses bred in Australia and New Zealand were descended from one stallion, Star Kingdom, that was imported into Australia from Ireland in the 1950s. Since about 1990, Australian and NZ racehorse breeders have imported more foreign stallions to reduce the number of inbred lines and this has helped to bring local horses up to international standard.

Irish genetic research done in 2005 identified 28 animals alone were identified as the ancestors of 80% of all racehorses alive today and 95% of racehorses are descended from one foundation stallion (the Darley Arabian). Traditionally three foundation stallions (the Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Barb and the Byerley Turk which might have been a Turkmen or Akhal Teke horse but no-one’s really sure) are regarded as the male ancestors of all racehorses.

The rate of injuries to racehorses such as leg fractures is quite high and apparently getting higher and it’s possible inbreeding may be responsible for the increased rate of injuries in part. Most racehorses also have nosebleeds or bleed in the lungs after racing but you will not necessarily read about this in the sports pages. There are other issues too that influence the injury rate such as the hardness of the ground (American horses race on dirt while racehorses in other countries race on grass), the age at which horses should start racing (in some countries horses start racing at age 2 and some people argue that’s too young) and whether fillies and colts should be racing together.http://outsports.com/jocktalkblog/2008/05/05/fix-the-horse-not-the-tracks/

Also I’ve been reading about the settlement of Nueva Germania in Paraguay which was founded in the 1870s by Elizabeth Nietzsche (the sister of Friedrich) and her husband as an Aryan colony. The founding population was small and made up of a few families from Saxony. Modern descendants of the Nueva Germania settlers don’t mix much with outsiders and many of them have mental and physical deformities due to inbreeding.http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Rebuilding-a-pure-Aryan-home-in-the-Paraguayan-2723542.php#page-1

Live in Australia, live in a horse-mad country where workers everywhere down tools for a whole afternoon (or three hours anyway) in November for a horse race and the main contender for a national poem is a story of a bunch of cowboys chasing a runaway colt that’s joined a group of wild mountain horses near Mount Kosciuszko on the border between New South Wales and Victoria.http://www.wallisandmatilda.com.au/man-from-snowy-river.shtml

@glossy: The Jane Austen example is not a good one. If parental veto had been in effect then 3 bad things would have happened:
(1) Mr. Darcy would have been forced to marry his cousin, Miss De Bourgh,
(2) Elizabeth would have been forced to marry the obnoxious Mr. Collins,
(3) Mr. Bingley would not have been permitted to marry Miss Bennet because of her lower station.

Interesting post. We come from Chimps, which are much more alpha than us. The reason we become more beta is that cold climate requires the effort of monogamy for child rearing. Today, with material surplus, that is no longer the case. We are headed toward Africa or the Philipines, where moderate climate year round turned men into gangsters that are not much good at value add activities in a modern world.
Of course, this is only one side of the evolutionary pressure today. Having a big brain is still rewarded. I bet if one can measure the alphaness of a person, higher IQ for the same degree of alphaness will have higher fitness at finding mates. It is just that due to our evolutionary past, big brains are more associated with betas since they evolved together.
What would our world be like, decades hence, where males are both more alpha and smarter? I will leave that for you to speculate. On our way there, I expect the dysgenic trend to continue as betas lose out to the lower IQ alphas. Until a new norm comes about, it is also going to significantly damage the existing social fabric. We live in interesting times.

We should note that the effect of birth control throws a big wrench into this entire debate about “alphas” and “betas.” Women may, in their youth, fuck all sorts of high status guys, but if they are on birth control while they are doing it, it’s essentially just a form of recreation and does not carry the same sorts of implications if they were not on it. Being a “high-status” male who gets to fuck as many women as he wants, but doesn’t get the benefit of having kids from the encounters (although he may get a sexual disease), makes the actual benefits of being a high-status male rather dubious. I actually see the recent advances in sexual freedom to be, if anything, very favorable to low status guys. “game” is if anything about low status men acquiring the social skills to appeal to women who otherwise might not look at them twice. What the sexual revolution and the current marriage laws are really bad for are the men who are the hard-working provider type men since the current political climate features no way for them to buy women outright or shield themselves from being cuckolded. Indeed, most child support laws now, punish men who have wives who cheat on them by making the guy pay because its “best for the children.” These guys work their ass off and the then end up with nothing. The net effect I see is one of driving men away from devoting themselves to careers and towards lives of stay-at-home dad hood or perhaps being professional pickup artists who try to get women pregnant. On the other hand, I have read that even lesbians who get sperm from sperm banks prefer men who are tall and have ivy-league degrees. So maybe my assessment is way off.